"The Moonwalker Who Knew" · 1930–2016
Edgar Dean Mitchell was born on 17 September 1930 in Hereford, Texas. He earned a BS in industrial management from Carnegie Mellon, a BS in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. He flew two combat missions in Korea and served as a naval test pilot before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 1966. He served as lunar module pilot on Apollo 14 (January–February 1971), spending 9 hours and 17 minutes on the lunar surface — making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon. He was decorated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal. He died on 4 February 2016, one day before the 45th anniversary of his lunar landing.
Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in 1973, following a profound epiphany he experienced during the return trip from the Moon — a sudden overwhelming sense of universal connectedness and the awareness that consciousness is the fundamental reality of the cosmos. This experience shaped the rest of his life and career.
Mitchell was one of the most credentialled public advocates for UAP reality in history. Beginning in the 1990s, he spoke publicly about his belief that extraterrestrials have visited Earth and that the U.S. government had been covering up this fact since 1947. He stated in multiple interviews that he had been briefed — by unnamed individuals he described as former intelligence officials — on the Roswell crash and subsequent reverse engineering programmes, and that he considered the reality of ET presence "the greatest story never told."
In 2008, he gave an interview to the British radio programme Kerrang! in which he stated unequivocally that the Roswell crash involved non-human craft and non-human occupants, and that insiders had confirmed this to him directly. He also described an attempt by him and colleagues to make contact with figures at the Pentagon who might facilitate official disclosure — an attempt that was, he said, blocked by the intelligence community.
Mitchell's founding of IONS reflected his conviction — born from his lunar epiphany — that the scientific study of consciousness was the most important frontier of human knowledge, and that phenomena labelled "paranormal" (ESP, remote viewing, UAP contact) pointed toward genuine features of reality that materialist science could not accommodate. He collaborated with parapsychology researchers and conducted experiments in ESP communication during his Apollo mission (without NASA's knowledge). IONS continues to operate as a research institution investigating consciousness.
Mitchell was a uniquely powerful symbol in the UAP disclosure movement: a credentialled MIT PhD, a distinguished Naval officer, an Apollo astronaut, and the sixth human being to walk on the Moon — saying publicly, repeatedly, and unambiguously, that he was convinced extraterrestrials had visited Earth and that the government was covering it up. His institutional stature made it impossible to dismiss him as a crank.